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Topic: [RM2k3] The Holy Whale (Read 2535 times)

The world is veiled in Darkness, as the Evil Lord rose from his prison.Warriors and wizards, one by one, fell under his strikes...Only the King now remains...His only hope, a prophecy:"When the world is in Darkness, the Holy Whale will come..."

You play as the King who, after discovering an old book of legends, learns about an evil labyrinth hidden within the Castle. This is the only path that will allow him to liberate the Holy Whale and purge the world of the Evil Lord. Explore the labyrinth to gather scales and put an end to all this madness!

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The Holy Whale is a semi-randomised Rogue-like game made on RPG Maker 2003 with a twists on the move. The King is the only hope left in the world, as the Evil Lord has taken over the lands and unleashed his monsters. Warriors and wizards are no more, and citizens are too frightened to do anything.

The game proposes semi-randomly designed rooms to avoid the awful level deisgn problems caused by fully random generation. This means that the rooms will all be designed by hand, but will be connected differently to each other to ensure that all playgames will be different. There will be enough rooms to make sure of that This way I avoid level problems like Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac, Shiren the Wanderer, which all are good games, but terribly bad when it comes to level design.

The game will revolve around puzzles to solve with skills. All skills are based on chess-like movements. The King basically use chess-King movements and will be able to use Tower, Fool, and Knight movements, which will allow the King to reach unreachable areas.

Worth be mentionning, this is my first custom non mini-game and I'm quite proud of the art, but I'm aware there are probably mistakes and I'm ready to get any input on this.

FeaturesTo be added

Screenshots

DownloadsNot yet, sorry :/ I want to look at the random thing first, and will release a demo once this is sorted!

Left to do (28.02.2017) - Design the rooms- Create entry/exit points- Final boss- End sequences- Credits- List all features and release game

I was working on a rpg maker roguelike ages ago (but like most of my project it died). I was doing the map generation by having a pool of premade rooms. When the game started it would create the dungeon by picking rooms from the pool. Then there was some key rooms that where always the same and in the same place in the dungeon. But it was kinda messy way of doing it, there was a variables keeping track of what each room lead to and the teleport nodes was just big conditional branches.

Not sure how the game works, but if you find your skills while you play could be to randomize where you get them. Or alternative randomize the puzzles from a couple of premade variations of them.

Yeah that's where I was going and I think I'll do that. I am trying at the moment to choose the path like Spelunky, which is quite clever but on a bigger scale. I won't have any key rooms other than the last room which is the goal.As for the skills, definitely it was planned to randomise where the player get them. I was planning on doing it via shops, which are in certain rooms, and since the rooms are randomly chosen then that would mean different shops or no shop or something. I maybe should make sure there's at least one.

The idea then is to get short playthroughs rather than a long game. I could do a "Story Mode" later on I guess, which would be longer once I'm sure all is doing good.I was thinking as well as maybe since some skills will be maybe a bit expensive, to allow the player from a playthrough to another to keep the obtained gold for example.

I've got some news again! Well I now managed to get to do more on this project. First of all, this topic doesn't seem to have the GIF of the intro I posted on the Screenshot Central topic, so here we are:

This intro is definitive, so I won't change it again, unless spelling errors I didn't see.

The new part is on the generation. The idea I had was to do semi-randomized, so that the connections between rooms is different, but the rooms themselves are designed by hand mainly, with sometimes random events. The plan was to take an action similar to that of Spelunky for that. I take a board of 4x4 squares, I choose randomly the starting type of room among the first row (left, middle left, middle right, right), once I have that position I choose among 5 different rooms that conserve that pattern. I then choose a random direction (except I never go back up!) and choose again among 5 templates, and so on, until i reach the last row. Once the last row is picked, the following room is the boss. Of course you're allowed backtracking, except when you meet the boss. The path is chosen before you enter the labyrinth, which allows me, through some math, to know which room is where in advance. I do not use tons of conditions, which made me go through algortihms of hell, and I found something that's easy to use, and to change if I want to add more rooms per template (if you'd look at my little booklet, it's full of diagrams and maths everywhere). That was actually quite easy. I had all my maps ID, entrance and exit points, ect... stored in variables and some switch .

The problem I had, and which took me some time was the teleportation. I wanted to avoid the ugly conditions that makes for some insane amount of lines of event. This is what took me so much time. By using my previous maths, I managed also to find a solution. It doesn't rule out completely conditions, but instead of having hundreds, I have about 15. So i present you the results (with backtracking!) in the GIF below. The number in the rooms are the map IDs, i just used it to check quickly it worked. I've tried it about 50 times, and it always worked.

You cana ctually see the different move sets of the player as well :9Next step, designing the rooms, make the boss, and the end sequence, similarly to the intro previously shown.For people interested I can show the code, or you can wait for the game release, which will be non crypted.Voilą, enjoy

A little bit of news!I was willing to implement random shops in the labyrinth so that the player would buy the skills instead of finding them, so I've coded a rather simple shop system. Since I'm now set on the fact that the game will be puzzle-driven, I've had the idea, instead of adding gold, that the shopkeeper would be a vampire, and would request blood (i.e. Life Force) as payment. Each of the three skills costs 50% of your life bar. The shop also sells potion for 20%, which recover 20% of your lifebar (yes, it's the same amount, it is done on purpose, as you can also heal on random shrines). The last item is a special item but requires you to give 100% of your life. It's up to the player to find how he can buy it without dying

So now that all systems are good and working (except Final Boss but I've yet to find an entertaining way to do it, so will probably do near the end), I'm running into the level design!

A quick update. Holy Whale is not dead (very not so), but has been moved to Game Maker instead of RPG Maker 2003. This implied that I coded everything by hand (GML is much more fun to code with than C# in Unity imho). Or rather, I started porting it last week, and all moves and choices (King, Tower, Fool, and Knights) are working smoothly, well smoothier than in RM2k3, and no lag in inputs or whatever weird stuff that used to happen in RM2k3.

Why did I do that? Firstly to improve my coding skills. Secondly, if I want to go to the industry, using an actual engine in which you have to do everything by hand is much more rewarding. I know, it's not Unity But I really like Game Maker. It's like Unity, but much more user friendly, with good menus, and nothing fundamental hidden in random functions names (and the online API is much more clearer, as well). FInally, it should also allow me to do stuff more freely, such as dialogue systems and cutscenes, but other things that would take insane weird events in RM2k3 but quite simple if you can code it from scratch (yay arrays, yay proper pointers).

I decided to change some little things for this version, like the moves other than the Kings are now considered as "items" which is that if you don't have anymore of it, then you're stuck with default King movement. I think this will induce the little plus strategy I tried to put before (with decreasing life with time but which didn't work out very well in the end). I'm keeping the graphics but edited some parts RM2k3 was bitching about.

I've got nothing exciting to show that hasn't been shown in the RM2k3 version unfortunately, but hopefully, now that I am unemployed, it should come fast!